Last Friday, just as I was going to start copying files from my old desktop Tertius to my new desktop Quartus, was when Tertius decided to quit working. First I couldn't boot...then later it couldn't even find the hard drive. On top of that, I got blocked from accessing my online backup service, and the password reset wasn't working either. It was a very bad Friday evening, but then good things started happening...

Good old obsolete Frogmouth, who is spending a protracted retirement as a glorified stand-in for an external hard drive (since it's a Windows XP device) got to do great work disgorging many gigabytes of backed up files I've been adding over the past year or so. Not a complete backup, since it doesn't have a big enough hard drive, but wonderful Frogmouth kept me from having a nervous breakdown over the prospect of losing everything!

Around noon Saturday I realized that if I forwarded the password reset email to another email account I was able to get the link to work and reset the password. Then iDrive saved the day and proved itself worth every cent I've spent. It had nearly everything, even my music playlists, though my in-progress project will have to be rebuilt from ground up. But thanks to iDrive my remaining losses were small--2 months worth of emails and part of my 2018 journal since for some bizarre reason it never found it or backed it up. But I manually back up my journal to Starfish and also keep a few week's worth of entries I've composed at work on Penzu. So I only lost a day and a half from Easter weekend--could be far worse!

Though it's been a rough few days, I must be grateful for the timing. So much worse if it had happened while Quartus was still in the mail headed my way! That would have been far more frustrating, but with Quartus around I'm pretty much up and running with everything except local email.

Thanks to being able to use Starfish to do online research, I learned I could buy a SATA/IDE to USB converter for not that much. Got it on Monday, and after some fiddling, I was able to get Tertius's hard drive attached as an external drive to Quartus...and I was able to get at my missing emails and other files. HALLELUJAH! (Turns out the hard drive quit spinning because I dislodged a cable when I tried to reset the BIOS, but Tertius's OS is still messed up beyond my skill level to fix.)

Losing Tertius (short or long term) made me aware of other items I would miss. Like games! So to my intense delight on Sunday, I was thrilled to discover that my beloved puzzle software that I use to do puzzles of my illustrations is still available and Windows 10 compatible. Need to get my email mess sorted out before I can start buying more software, but what a joy!